


you, in a fight you lost

by arahir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Injured Keith (Voltron), Injury, M/M, Panicked Shiro (Voltron), Protective Shiro (Voltron), The Full Shiro (Voltron) Spectrum, Worried Shiro (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-07 11:31:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11622642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: Keith loses a fight with Haggar. It's bad.It’s too much to take in at once—there’s blood on Keith's face, in his hair, streaked down the white of his Paladin armor on one side. A mark spreads across his cheek like a bruise, dark and lurid, and he’s holding one arm at an odd angle—No, it’sbroken.He takes a halting step toward them. The splatter of blood hitting the floor is audible.That's how they learn Altean healing pods don't work on Galra.





	you, in a fight you lost

**Author's Note:**

> [insp.](https://goodtohaveyouback.tumblr.com/post/163448206921/what-happened-to-you-based-off-an-old-fic-prompt)

Keith takes on Haggar. It’s an unavoidable fight, so even Lance doesn’t give him grief about going off half-cocked, which is a relief because from what they can hear over the comms, it’s not going well.

A few minutes in, Keith stops responding all together. At first Shiro doesn’t notice, because he’s neck deep in Galra drones trying to figure out where the tech they're after is, but once it’s secured and he's back in his lion, the harsh sound of Keith’s panting is conspicuously loud over the radio.

He’s the only missing piece. No one’s got eyes on him, and Red is floating beside the Galra ship like a puppet with her strings cut. Druid magic, and that explains why he’s taking Haggar on face-to-face, but it doesn’t get them any closer to figuring out where he is on the ship. He's afraid if he asks he'll distract him, because the fight on the other end of the comms is moving too fast too follow.

There’s a sound, like a roar—it takes Shiro a moment to realize it’s coming from Keith. It cuts off on a thudding crash, like he’s just been tossed into a wall—

Enough.

“Keith? You ok?” He pushes full power to where Red is floating, scanning for any signs of the fight on the black windows of the Galra ship. They don't have much time before it recovers power. “Keith—“

That’s as far as he gets.

A cry of pain shatters across their shared frequency, so loud it statics out at the end.

It’s like a physical shock. No one says anything for a long moment, waiting for whatever is on the other end of it, because that can’t be it. They’ve never seen Keith lose a fight. Even at the Garrison, he was unstoppable. He almost held his own against _Zarkon_. The idea that he might lose is so ridiculous it’s laughable.

Shiro feels the blood drain from his face as the silence stretches, interminable.

“Keith? Keith, _come on_ —Coran, can you tell where he is?” He tries to keep his voice calm, but the sound of that cry is still echoing in his ears, and Keith’s end is dead silence.

“...I’m not picking him up.” Coran says after a moment.

“Keith? You there man?” Lance asks. “I’m going in there,” he says. It’s totally absent his usual bravado, but he says it like he’s ready to take on the whole ship as a matter of course.

“Uh, no, you’re not. I can’t hold these guys off on my own,” Hunk says. “But we have to do something, soon—“

“I see him!” yells Pidge.

And there he is, floating toward his lion, whole and hale. He's got one hand clutched to his side, but he's moving.

There’s a round of relieved cheers over the comms, but still nothing from Keith. His radio must be fried, Shiro thinks, and the tight thing in his chest unwinds. If druid magic can stop a lion, it can mess up a radio—

There’s a small, sharp intake of breath from Keith's end.

“Shiro?” Keith’s voice is so quiet he almost misses it over the other chatter.

“Keith? You ok?” he asks.

There’s a long silence.

“Yeah,” Keith says, finally, oddly breathless.

“...Keith?” Shiro asks again, and tries not to sound as scared as this is making him. Everyone is quiet at his question, so he hears with piercing clarity when Keith responds.

“I’m fine,” he says, but it’s a tone he’s never heard Keith use before, small and unsure. No—he has heard it before, right before Taujeer, after days of running from Zarkon.

_Just tired, like you said._

And then he'd stolen a ship in the middle of the night, floated off to wait for Zarkon because he thought he was a Galra tracking beacon, and gotten himself and Allura blown up and stranded in uncharted space.

“Everyone, get back to the ship.”

His tone doesn't make room for argument. No one says anything else. They’ve been together long enough to read each other’s moods, to know when something’s off. As soon as Black is parked in the hangar, he’s out and moving. They group and wait—Red’s moving slow.

Shiro runs over the worst-case scenarios in his mind, as is his habit, and plans for each one as best he can. Immediately his mind goes to the wound Haggar gave him, and the undiluted agony of it. Leave it to Keith to play the stoic. Keith would rather pass out than admit something could defeat him _—had_ passed out.

The Trials of Marmora still give him nightmares.

“Come on, Keith _,_ ” he mutters as the lion lands. He’s already gearing up for a fight about whatever’s wrong, but then Red's hatch opens, and every thought in his mind evaporates.

Keith steps out of the lion and pulls off his helmet. It’s too much to take in at once—there’s blood on his face, in his hair, streaked down the white of his Paladin armor on one side. A mark spreads across his cheek like a bruise, dark and lurid, and he’s holding one arm at an odd angle—

No, it’s _broken_. 

He takes a halting step toward them. The splatter of blood hitting the floor is audible.

No one moves for a moment, too stunned. Lance curses under his breath _._

Keith takes one more tottering step before he collapses. He comes down hard, like a sack of rocks, not making a move to stop his own momentum.

Shiro hears himself give an aborted, involuntary yell, too far away still to do anything about it, and then he runs.

He skids and almost trips when he gets to Keith, graceless. The other three are close behind, and he hears Pidge talking fast over the radio to Allura and Coran.

“Get him up, get him up,” says Lance, on the edge of panic, and Shiro already has an arm under Keith’s shoulders. There’s no avoiding the broken arm entirely, but he doesn’t cry out when it’s moved, and that’s—alarming. He maneuvers his other arm under Keith’s knees, trying to be gentle as possible.

“Wait,” Hunk puts a hand on Keith’s stomach, stopping Shiro. “Are you sure we should move him yet—“

“Yes! We’re moving him!” Lance yells.

“No, I mean—his side,” Hunk says, bending down and parting a rent in the fabric of the black pilot suit that Shiro didn't notice before.

"How did he get to the lion with a hole in his suit?" Pidge asks.

"I think the blood sealed it somehow. But that means he's been this way for a while..." Hunk hisses and brushes his finger over a wound Shiro can't see, but he knows when Keith feels it—he arches in Shiro's hold like a live wire. The sound he makes is guttural, alien, almost like he's choking.

"Hey, hey, Keith—it's ok, it's going to be fine," Shiro says, leaning over him, aware that what he’s saying is barely better than nonsense. Keith's face is wrecked. Beads of sweat are smudging with the blood around his closed eyes.

Keith coughs, and it's a wet, hacking sound.

"Move," he says to Hunk. It's harsher than he means it to be, but he can't watch this.

Hunk doesn’t step away. "There's something broken off in there." His voice is steady even though his face is a few shades off.  "We need to get it out and check him over. He's—we need to wrap it.”

The possibility of lethal blood loss is implied. Shiro's gaze tunnels in on the red puddle on the floor—it’s too much, and they haven’t even seen the inside of Red yet to know how much he's lost.

Shiro closes his eyes. "Do it. Quick."

Pidge and Lance start getting the armor off him while Shiro maneuvers his body and Hunk checks him over.

“There's a cut on his head, but I think—I think this is it,” he says finally, eyeing the hole in Keith's side.

“Oh, besides the _broken arm_ you mean?” Lance’s voice is threaded with panic. “What happened to him?”

There’s a sputtering cough. Keith's eyes open, finally.

“Haggar threw me into a wall,” Keith says, and his voice is like gravel, but it douses some of the terror flaring up in the back of Shiro's mind.

“Oh—well. Is that all? You got brought down by a wall, man? That’s lame.” Lance says, relief turning his voice breathless.

“No,” Keith whispers. “I brought down the wall.”

There’s a long silence as Pidge finishes working off the armor around his waist. Hunk kneels and tears the skin-tight black fabric open the rest of the way, exposing his midriff. Shiro finally gets a clear view of the wound—and wishes immediately he hadn’t.

Keith was holding the tear shut, he realizes. That's why they didn't notice it right away, that's why he was able to get to his lion—because this is incomprehensible otherwise. It looks like something tore through him. The wound tears right across the center of his abdomen, blooming outward, the whole thing glistening wetly.

For a moment, Shiro forgets how to breathe. He saw every kind of wound imaginable in the arena, and he knows what lethal looks like. It looks like that, like part of his side is _gone._ Shiro’s vision goes fuzzy around the edges, and he blinks it away. Now that it’s exposed to the open air, the scent of gore is unmistakable.

Hunk swallows audibly. “Since you’re feeling talkative, buddy, you want to tell me what happened here?”

Keith doesn’t answer, but his eyes are still open. He looks at Shiro and wets his lips—there's blood on them. “She had some weird weapon. I think—it broke off.”

Shiro tries not to imagine what that fight was like, memories of his own losing with Haggar playing behind his eyes.

“How did you get away?” he asks.

Keith coughs again. “Dunno.”

That means Haggar let him go. That’s—not a good sign. He searches Keith’s face, but he looks away. He knows.

“We can’t leave it in there,” Hunk says, resigned.

Keith braces himself with his good hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “Do it.”

The sound he makes is inhuman. He’s holding Shiro’s shoulder so tight it hurts, even through the armor. Hunk digs around in the wound for a long minute—longer than it should take. He curses, finally, and pulls his hand away, empty.

“It's stuck,” he says weakly. "I can't get it."

"Stuck in _what_?" Lance asks.

"I don't know. A—a rib or something." Hunk wipes his hands on the front of his suit, but it doesn't do much but smear around the blood on his hands. He looks down at them, and then between the three of them, helpless.

The wound is bleeding freely again. Pidge is kneeled next to Keith, talking low and fast to distract him the pain, but he's sightless with it, panting hard.

 _Be the leader,_ Shiro tells himself, and closes his eyes.

“Wrap it, and let’s get him to a pod.”

Lance runs back to his lion and brings back a blanket, because of course he has a blanket in his lion. They use Pidge's bayard to slash it into manageable strips, and then they start wrapping his stomach, Shiro holding him up. The whole process feels like it takes an age, but when it's done Allura announces over the comms that they're entering the wormhole, so it can't have been more than a few minutes since they got back to the ship.

Keith is still gone. Shiro tries to ignore the terror pulsing through his gut—one thing at a time.

He grimaces and stands. Keith's weight settles in his arms, his head resting on Shiro's shoulder, and Keith doesn't twitch or make a sound even though his eyes are still open. This is going to take years off his life, Shiro thinks, and tries to move as fast as he can without jostling him too much.

When he gets to the room with the healing pods, Coran is just running in the door.

He pulls up short when he sees the mess in Shiro's arms. "What happened?"

"Haggar." The make-shift bandages around his stomach are already soaked through. It’s puddling on the floor—too much, too dark. "She left some kind of blade in him—we can't get it out. Is that going to affect the pod?"

Coran frowns. "I—I don't know."

Another spike of panic. It's constant now, a pulsing thrum in the back of his mind he knows he won't be able to think past if he focuses on it.

It takes Shiro, Coran, and Hunk working together to get him positioned in the pod without twisting his arm or touching his side. It's the first time he's seen Coran dead serious, and that adds another layer to his fear. One after the other, they’re stacking up, threatening to overwhelm him.

Coran and Hunk step back once Keith's settled in, but Shiro can't move his hand from where it's propping up Keith's head. His eyes are closed again, his skin an odd shade of grey underneath the sickly sheen of sweat and blood. He looks—young. He _is_ young.

He has the sudden, irrational urge to pull Keith back into his arms, but instead he pushes the soaked strands of hair away from his face and steps away.

Coran gives the all clear, and the pod closes.

It's the first distance he's had from the situation since Keith stepped out of the lion, the first chance he's had to breathe. He scrubs a hand over his face and presses his fingers into his eyes until he sees stars. His glove is damp; he knows it's going to leave a mark

He can feel the rest of the team watching. They’re scared. This is the most visceral injury they've seen so far, but he's been aware of its inevitability like a storm on the horizon. They've killed and killed, and everything comes back around eventually.

Except—Keith's not going to die.

Just as the thought crosses his mind, the gentle blue glow around the pod turns a rhythmic, bleeding red, and his breath catches somewhere in his chest.

"What's—why is it doing that?" Lance asks, fear creeping into his voice and eyes.

Coran is already tapping on the display, Pidge beside him. "I don't know, it's never done that before, I can't—"

"I think I know why."

Allura steps into the room, eyes the blood on the floor in front of the pod and looks away. "It's—I think it's because he's Galra."

Shiro closes his eyes, but the red light from the pod still bleeds through.

"That's ridiculous," Pidge says. "What, the Castle doesn't like Galra? There has to be some override."

"No, it's not that..." Allura's moves closer, puts a hand on Shiro's arm. He meets her gaze, and her eyes are searching, sympathetic. They're the only two people in the room on the same level of this conversation, he realizes.

"Galra physiology is significantly different from that of Alteans," she says quietly. "It's not programmed for it. I'm sorry."

"Then change the programming." Pidge pushes Coran aside and starts messing with the display.

"That's not how it works,” he says softly.

Lance makes a sound like a chuckle that gets stuck halfway up his throat. "Wait, you—what are you guys talking about? You can't be serious. If the pod won't work, get him out—"

"Lance—" Allura starts, pleading, but Hunk cuts her off.

"No, he's right." Hunk's been quiet this whole time, and he's got more of Keith's blood on him than Shiro does. "We have to try something. There's gotta be old fashioned medical tech somewhere on this ship."

They seize on that idea and leap into action, but Shiro can’t move from his vigil.

He's killed up close and personal, with his bare hands. He knows how much blood it takes, and he knows how much Keith's lost because it's on the floor, and it’s on Hunk, and it’s on _him_ ; the raw metal tang of it is almost overwhelming.

The pod was a long shot—they’re lucky Keith even made it to his lion—and this was always going to take something from them eventually. Or someone. He was so busy writing himself off as the bad bet, he forgot that's now how odds work.

 _This is it_ , he thinks. _This is the worst case scenario_.

But he's got no plan waiting in the wings, no way to fix this. He's not sure what he's going to do but punching the pod is sounding more and more appealing, and he clenches the fist of his robotic arm so hard it whirs in protest— _wait_.

His robotic arm—his _Galra_ arm. 

"Open it."

Shiro’s right there to catch him when the pod opens. Keith's still breathing, heartbeat fast and thready. The wound on his side is barely bleeding anymore, but the purple mark on his cheek has crept down his neck and the rest of his skin is so pallid it's almost grey.

He lays him down on the floor as gently as he can and starts stripping off his own gloves and the armor covering his arm. He feels eyes on his back.

"Quintessence heals Galra, right?" He looks around. Everyone is staring at him like he's already gone mad and is speaking in tongues. He looks at Coran and Allura. "Quintessence? Yes? What do you know about it?" He let's frustration color his voice. They're out of time.

"Yes," says Allura, "but—Shiro, we don't have any. And even if we did, it's—"

"We can get some! Remember that secret base? It was full of it." Hunk looks from Pidge to Lance and back again. "Guys?"

Shiro doesn't answer—pulls the black fabric back from the wound again, with prejudice. It falls away in tatters, exposing more of Keith than he'd probably want seen, but it's not the time for modesty.

It's Pidge that figures it out first.

"Shiro..."

He ignores her. He's got nothing left to lose if this doesn't work.

"Keith? Hey." He cups Keith's face in his non-robotic hand and brushes a thumb over his cheek, smearing the blood there. "You still with us?"

It’s a minor miracle when Keith blinks, eyes opening to slits. He turns his head toward Shiro’s palm. “Yeah,” he says, but it’s a bare sound, all breath, like he’s lost his voice.

Shiro smooths a hand through his lank hair, wipes at the blood and sweat on his forehead and around his eyes—it doesn’t help, but it’s a compulsive gesture, and he doesn’t stop himself. “How are you feeling?”

_Stalling, stalling._

He’s peripherally aware that this might be the last conversation they have, and wants to make it last—because there’s a vanishing low chance what he’s about to do will help, but it will put an end to it one way or the other.

Keith blinks a few times. “Bad,” he croaks.

“I know. I know.” He swallows. “You know I—love you, right?”

He ignores the gasp behind him, and the pained grunt as someone elbows Lance in the stomach. Keith blinks at him again, and nods as much as he can.

“Ok—I—You know I wouldn’t hurt you, right? But we don’t have any options left, and—” His own voice is starting to crack. He powers up his arm—there’s another chorus of gasps from behind him—and brings it into Keith’s field of vision. The glow is reflected in the slit of his blue eyes for a brief moment before he understands. Keith closes his eyes and nods again.

There’s yelling behind him—he catches a curse and someone is threatening someone while Pidge explains in short words that Shiro’s arm is _made of_ quintessence—

He shoves it all away, and pushes his fingers into the wound.

Keith makes a low sound that rises into a scream, and apparently he still has enough strength to fight back, because his good hand is pushing against Shiro’s robotic arm so hard it hurts.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” He digs around in the wound, feels the edge of metal, seizes it between his thumb and forefinger, and rips it out in a spray of gore. He tosses it somewhere behind him, and it skitters across the floor with a sound like breaking glass.

Keith’s hand is still a vice on his arm, but he's not pushing Shiro away anymore. He’s flagging. His eyes are closed, and either he’s holding his breath against the pain or he’s _not breathing._

Shiro looks at his robotic hand, the gore dampening the glow, and thinks:

_You owe me this much._

His logic is nebulous—it’s quintessence, and he should be able to make it do what he wants, but suddenly the lack of detail seems fatal. He looks over at the rest of the team, helpless.

Lance, and Hunk are standing together, Lance half clinging to Hunk’s arm with a hand over his mouth—it would be comical at any other time. Pidge shakes her head at Shiro, like she has no idea what he’s doing or how to help.

And then he feels a hand on his shoulder. “It might work,” Coran says. “Remember: you control it. Visualize what you want to do and—it's probably best not to look."

 _Don’t look_ doesn’t seem like the soundest advice, but again—he has nothing to lose. He closes his eyes, tries to imagine the wounds knitting back together under his hand, tries to imagine Keith whole and healthy—

He feels his arm crackle with energy, feels the strange heat of it against his face, and pushes it against what’s left of Keith’s side.

Keith makes that sound again, guttural and inhuman in agony, but it chokes off after a moment, and he feels the hand on his arm fall away. He doesn’t open his eyes, can’t look.

 _You’ve killed him,_  he thinks, distantly.

It feels like it takes minutes, which is—too long. Coran’s squeezes his shoulder, finally, and the arm powers down of its own accord. He opens his eyes, blinking away the static dancing in front of them, and makes himself look at what he’s done.

But—

“It worked,” Coran says, awed. And it’s true—there’s not a mark on Keith’s stomach. Except for the blood, there’s no sign he was ever missing half of it.

“Holy—did that actually work?” Lance rushes over and kneels, the other Paladins and Allura hot on his heels. “Uh, guys? Is he breathing?”

Pidge sticks a hand under Keith’s nose, and nods. “Yep!” She’s smiling.

Lance gives her a look that says he doesn’t think that’s a scientific way of testing it, but the rise and fall of Keith’s chest is unmistakable.

“Hey? Keith? You still here buddy?” Hunk still sounds shaky, like he can’t quite believe it. He pats Keith’s cheek, and Shiro has to resist the instinctual urge to yell at him for it, to tell all of them to take a step back. It's like he can't make himself believe what he's seeing. His heartbeat is still going out of control; none of the panic and terror has abated.

Keith jolts awake at Hunk's hand on his cheek. He gasps and flails and Shiro grabs his hand when he tries to sit up. Keith glances down to his side and back up, eyes wide.

Pidge lets out an uncharacteristic squeal and wraps her arms around his neck, Lance and Hunk following her lead. Keith’s eyes meet Shiro's over their heads, and he looks like he can't decide if he's annoyed or touched by the physical contact.

Shiro smiles at him, and hopes it reaches his eyes.

The hug goes on until Keith wiggles and tries to push them off with one shoulder, wincing. “Arm,” Keith croaks, and they let go.

“Oh, sorry." Hunk pats his head in apology, and Keith almost looks fond, despite himself. "Sorry, buddy."

Lance laughs, breathless. “We thought you were a goner, man.”

“Not quite.” Keith tries to sit up again and groans. “How many hands did you guys stick in me?“ He curses and Shiro steadies him with an arm behind his back.

“Uh, just me—and Shiro. So, two of us? Three hands.” Hunk wiggles his fingers and then swallows, like he’s grossed himself out. They’re still covered in blood, and—

It’s suddenly too much.

This close, Shiro can see the purple on the side of Keith’s face starting to bleed back to pale skin. There’s some color back in his cheeks, under the blood. Shiro’s vision blurs. He chokes on a breath and swallows, but he can't get his bearings.

Keith shoots him a startled look, and his gaze softens. “Shiro...”

The room is suddenly, conspicuously silent, but it’s too late to pull himself together. He pushes his forehead against Keith’s and tries to breathe around the mass of terror in his chest. He's coming down off his adrenaline high and—it's bad. Keith pulls his good hand out of the iron grip Shiro has on it and snakes it around Shiro’s back, pulling Shiro’s head down onto his shoulder.

“It’s ok,” Keith says, but it’s not.

Coran notices the awkward silence and starts making forced small talk with the other Paladins, as if their leader isn’t kneeling on the floor a few feet away from them in tears, but he’s grateful. His shuddering breaths aren’t the only sound in the room anymore, at least.

Shiro pulls himself back together by degrees. It takes a few minutes, but finally he clears his throat and pulls away, wiping at his eyes. “We should—get you cleaned up.”

Keith blinks at him, doleful. “You're not gonna heal my arm first?”

His heart seizes in his chest. He's not sure if he can do it again so soon, and what if he—

There's a hand on his face. "I'm kidding. One thing at a time, right?" He coughs again, but it doesn't sound bad. "And I really want to not be bloody and... naked on the floor right now."

Shiro lifts him into his arms, without preamble.

"I can walk," Keith says.

He tightens his grip. "Yeah, that's not happening."

He dispenses with all pretense and carries Keith to the room they've been mostly sharing since Keith came back from the Blade of Marmora base as one giant bruise. The other Paladins follow, like baby ducks. It's sweet, and—he's going to lose if they don't get some privacy. He's calm now, but Keith's blood is tacky in the joints of the robotic arm and he needs a shower before he can feel like anything approaching human.

They get to the room, and he sets Keith down on the bed as gently as he can, pulling the blanket over his exposed abdomen as everyone piles in behind them.

Lance looks around and puts a hand on chin. "Nice room." He eyes the red jacket slung over the cabinet by the door. "It looks—lived in."

Pidge and Hunk give him unimpressed looks. Keith doesn't rise to the bait; he's still pale with blood loss and Shiro has the sense that the pain of his arm is the only thing keeping awake at this point.

Shiro sighs. "Coran? Can we get some food up here maybe?"

"I'll do it. Also, I really want to wash my hands," Hunk says and makes a mock gagging sound. "Sorry, Keith."

Hunk leaving is the signal for everyone to disperse—except Allura. She lingers by the door, looking between them. "I'm... glad you're all right." By the smile on her face, it's more than genuine.

It means something. Things between them haven't been the same since he came back from the Blade of Marmora headquarters. Keith nods, and that's enough.

She leaves, and they're alone for the first time in what feels like days, though it's really only been an hour or so.

 _The worst two hours of my life_ , he thinks, which is saying something. He sits down on the bed  next to Keith, and he wants nothing more than he wants to bury his face in Keith's neck where he can feel his pulse and sleep for a year—except a shower.

So he pulls the blanket back and starts ripping away the rest of the black fabric from Keith's torso, as gently as he can. It's not precise, but it works—until he gets to the broken arm.

"Do you have your knife?" Shiro asks.

Keith blinks at him, out of it. It's probably on the floor in the hangar with everything else. He makes a mental note to enlist someone to help him clean out Red when he has a chance and activates his arm, using it to split the fabric around the swollen break. Keith flinches, but doesn't make a sound.

"Tell me if it hurts," Shiro says.

"...It hurts."

When he's done, he helps Keith hobble to the shower, and props him against one wall while he gets the water going and strips off his own armor. He's too exhausted to be elegant or graceful about any it, and he can feel Keith's eyes on his back the whole time. The instinct to go blush rises in him, but he stomps it down. It's new, this level of intimacy, but it's not _that_ new.

When he turns around, Keith's eyes are half-lidded. He's got his head pushed back against the wall, like he can't hold it up on his own, and he's holding the shoulder of his broken arm steady with his good hand. He looks—wrecked. Worse than he did after the Trials, which is saying something.

An old guilt rises in the back of his mind, but he stomps that down, too. Keith has his own reasons for being here, separate from anything that rests on Shiro's shoulders. Unbidden, the memory of his fight with the rest of the team before the mission to rescue Allura comes to mind. He's painfully logical, aware of ramifications and results in a way Shiro isn't always—in a way none of them are. It's one of the reasons he loves Keith, and it's terrifying.

Keith closes his eyes, and Shiro steps forward, maneuvering Keith's smaller frame under the shower, pulling him back against his chest in a loose hug that he leans in to out of habit and necessity.

The water sluices off them both a deep, translucent pink, Keith's blood spiraling down the drain. He takes his time brushing his fingers through Keith's hair, working out the tangles and blood, trying his best to avoid the gash on the back of his head. It looks worse than it is, but his stomach still flips for a dizzying moment at the sight of the open wound.

"Good?" he asks, when he's done and they're both as clean as they're going to get.

Keith turns in his embrace and pushes his face against Shiro's chest, mumbling something.

"What?"

Keith raises his head and meets his gaze for a second before he looks away again. His hair is plastered across his face and Shiro feels something dark tear through his chest, because he almost _lost_ this, and this is—precious, irreplaceable, everything. "I said—can you heal my arm?"

He can count the number of times Keith has asked him for something on one hand, with fingers to spare.

"...I'll try. Close your eyes," he whispers. Keith complies and hooks his good arm around Shiro's neck, like an anchor.

The light that comes off his arm as it powers on is _blinding_ —it's different from the vivid purple glow it puts off as a weapon—more of a violent, crackling white, limned in a violet so dark it's almost like a shadow. He remembers Coran's advice, tries to visualize what he wants to do in his mind, but this time he doesn’t close his eyes.

The second he lays his hand against the break, Keith arches against him, making a small, pained sound. The audible crack as his arm snaps back into place is worse. He feels himself convulse at the sound, the arm around Keith's back almost crushing. He doesn't let the power go though, moving it to the cut on Keith's scalp first.

"Anything else?" he asks, when he's reasonably sure he's done everything he can do.

Keith shakes his head. Shiro let's the power fade away, but he doesn't move his hand from where it's buried in Keith's hair. He still has his face pressed in the hollow of Shiro’s throat, and he's shaking, taking deep breaths.

"I didn't know your arm could do that," he says against Shiro's neck around his panting.

_Neither did I._

"Yeah. Guess it is good for something." He moves the hand in question to the side of Keith's face, wiping at some of the stubborn spots of blood until they melt away in the water. There's no purple discoloration left on his face—he debates whether he should mention that yet and decides to shelves it for later. Keith looks like he's about to fall asleep right there in the shower.

"It _is_ good," Keith says suddenly, and it takes Shiro a moment to pick up the conversation again. "It's part of you," Keith continues, "and you're good."

"Just good?" Shiro asks, joking, but it doesn’t come out quite right. Keith has an infallible ability to zero in on whatever he's feeling least secure about and attack it head on, with the same determination he takes on everything else. He's relentless.

Keith looks up, catching his gaze. "You're good—so it's good." He repeats it like it's a code and not some delirium fueled pablum; he's not letting Shiro laugh this one off.

Shiro looks away. "I didn't think it would work, actually," he admits after a long moment. "You stopped breathing and I thought—" The words break and lodge in his throat. "I thought—"

 _I thought you were dead._ _I thought I killed you._ He can't say it.

Keith summons some strength and gathers Shiro's face in both hands, forces him to meet his eyes. "I'm okay," he says, and then, almost breathless: "You saved me."

He doesn't give Shiro time to deny it or downplay it before he pulls him down into a soft kiss. It's sweet and easy and neither of them move to deepen it. He pulls away after a moment, but doesn't go far.

"I think—yeah, I'm gonna go to sleep now," Keith says and lays his cheek against Shiro's chest like he means it.

"Go ahead." Shiro presses a kiss to his temple, because he can. "I've got you."

**Author's Note:**

> This was... really self indulgent. Thanks for reading!
> 
> You can cry about Voltron with me on [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir)!


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